Taras Shevchenko, The Dnipro River, and The Dnipro Rapids in The Ivan Sokulskyi's Poetry: Figurative-Semantic Structures of Resistance

Abstract

Background. The anti-colonial creative strategies of dissident poets, as well as the semantic aspects of resistance to denazification and the "dematerialization" of the Ukrainian world-space, actualized in their poetry, contribute to understanding the contemporary socio-political and cultural situation in the country and serve as models of Resistance. The artistic implementation of anti-colonial strategies, including the choice of corresponding figurative and semantic structures, is influenced by the cultural geography of the region. For poets of the Dnipro region the Dnipro River is an especially significant cultural and nation-building symbol, often semantically associated with the Taras Shevchenko's figure in terms of unconquerability, freedom, and sovereignty. It is precisely for the poets of the Dnipro region, particularly Ivan Sokulskyi, who shaped the artistic code of resistance to the system, that the expansion of the dyad Dnipro–Shevchenko into the triad Dnipro–Shevchenko–Dnipro rapids is characteristic. The actualization of the anti-colonial cultural meaning of the Dnipro rapids is conditioned both nationalhistorical and cultural-geographical factors, as well as the awareness of the totalitarian ecocide, in the 1960s–1970s. The aim of the article is to examine the artistic features of the Ivan Sokulskyi's lyrics, a prominent representative of dissident poetry of Dnipro region, namely the figurative and semantic structures in which national resistance is concentrated around the triad Taras Shevchenko – Dnipro River – Dnipro rapids.
Methods. The methodological framework includes approaches from nationology, postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, cultural geography, structural semantic analysis, as well as basic literary studies methods.
Results. It has been established that the artistic specificity of the development of anti-colonial strategies of resistance to the Soviet regime in dissident
poetry may exhibit regional differences determined by national-historical and cultural-geographical factors. In the artistic worldview of poets from the Dnipro region, anti-colonial resistance accumulates national history, centers the worldview around the image of the Dnipro River, actualizes the historical, national-cultural, and resistant meanings of the Dnipro rapids and the fact of their flooding as an imperial ecocide, as an outrage against national memory, and emphasizes the image of the steppe as the quintessence of Ukrainian identity. These features are revealed in the poetry of Ivan Sokulskyi. The Taras Shevchenko 's figure and oeuvre are organically integrated in Sokulskyi's lyrics into the figurative-semantic structure of the Dnipro River and the Dnipro rapids, accumulating meanings of stone-like steadfastness, unconquerability, and freedom, relevant for affirming the idea of Ukraine's and its nation's anti-colonial resistance. The correlation of the components of the figurative-semantic structure Taras Shevchenko – Dnipro River – Dnipro rapids is realized in Sokulskyi's poetry through intertextual allusions, paratext (epigraphs), the conceptualization of Shevchenko's image and his "memory places", the metonymic convergence of his image with the topos of the Dnipro River and stone, as well as a kind of "dialogue" with Taras Shevchenko through the use of his poetic images (Dnipro, steppe, grave, cliffs, Cossacks, blood, etc.), but endowed with a different, anti-colonial meaning corresponding to the dissident era and issues.
Conclusions. Dissident poetry of Dnipro region, particularly that of I. Sokulskyi, while possessing its own poetic specificity in expressing anti-colonial resistance and at the same time being embedded in the broader Ukrainian dissident discourse, opens new perspectives for researchers, including in terms of the significance of the Taras Shevchenko's figure and oeuvre the formation of anticolonial consciousness both in totalitarian times and today.